Ever since the CIA secured his throne in 1953, the shah of Iran had been the centerpiece of American foreign policy in the Middle East. "I just wish there were a few more leaders around the world with his foresight," President Nixon reflected in April 1971. "And his ability to run, basically, let's face it, a virtual dictatorship in a benign way."
Nixon may not have intended to send a message by sending Richard Helms out as the American ambassador to Iran in 1973. But he did. "We were amazed that the White House would send a man who, after all, had such associations with the CIA, which was deemed by every Iranian responsible for the fall of Mossadeq," said Henry Precht, the American embassy's chief political officer. "It seemed to us to abandon any pretense of a sort of a neutral America and to confirm that the shah was our puppet."
On December 31, 1977, in a toast to the shah at a glittering state dinner, President Carter called the monarchy "an island of stability in a sea of turmoil," a view that had been confirmed and repeated by the CIA's spies and analysts for fifteen years beforehand. It was, in fact, the very phrase the shah used to describe himself.
But when Howard Hart, one of the bravest officers the clandestine service ever produced, came to Tehran a few weeks later and started doing what he did best--skulking around the streets and reporting on the real world--he reached the opposite conclusion. His work was so pessimistic that his superiors suppressed it. It directly contradicted everything the CIA had said about the shah since the 1960s.
The agency had reported nothing to suggest that the shah was in trouble. It lacked the ability to question twenty-five years of its own reporting. In August 1978, the agency told the White House that Iran was nowhere near a revolution. Weeks later, there were riots in the streets. As they spread, the CIA's top analysts sent Admiral Turner a draft National Intelligence Estimate for his signature. It said the shah might survive for another ten years. Or he might not. Turner read it, deemed it useless, and shelved it.
On January 16, 1979, the shah fled Tehran. A few days later, Howard Hart's view from the streets grew decidedly darker.
He was waylaid by an armed gang--followers of a seventy-seven-year-old religious zealot, Ayatollah Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini, who was preparing to return to Tehran from exile. Hart was an investment banker's son who had spent three years as a young child interned in a Japanese prison camp in the Philippines during World War II. He was now a prisoner once more. His captors roughed him up, held a kangaroo court, proclaimed him a CIA spy, and prepared to execute him on the spot. Proclaiming his innocence, pleading for his life, preparing to die, Hart asked to see the nearest mullah. A young cleric arrived to find the blond, blue-eyed, hard-muscled spy in the clutches of rough justice.
"I said, 'This is wrong--nowhere in the Holy Koran is this sanctioned,'" Hart remembered. The mullah pondered the question and agreed. Hart went free.
"WE DID NOT UNDERSTAND WHO KHOMEINI WAS"
A few days later, on February 1, 1979, the popular revolution that pushed the shah from the Peacock Throne opened the way for Khomeini's return to Tehran. Thousands of Americans, including most of the embassy's staff, were evacuated as the chaos in the streets grew. A secular prime minister still held power alongside a Revolutionary Council, and the CIA tried to work with him, influence him, and mobilize him against Saddam Hussein. "Some very, very sensitive classified conversations occurred at the level of Prime Minister," said Bruce Laingen, the charge d'affaires at the American embassy. "We went to the degree of actually sitting down with them and giving them highly classified intelligence on Iraq."
Laingen had been the youngest officer at the American embassy in Tehran in 1953. He was the most senior officer in 1979. In the intervening years a succession of station chiefs and ambassadors had become far too cozy with the shah, far too fond of his caviar and his champagne. "We paid for it," Laingen said. "We are there to find out how people are thinking and why they are thinking that way and behaving that way. And if we get too comfortable in believing something that fits our purposes--well, we are in hellish trouble."
The idea that religion would prove to be a compelling political force in the late twentieth century was incomprehensible. Few at the CIA believed that an ancient cleric could seize power and proclaim Iran an Islamic republic. "We did not understand who Khomeini was and the support his movement had," Turner said--or what his seventh-century view of the world might mean for the United States.
"We were just plain asleep," he said.
On March 18, 1979, Howard Hart, now the acting chief of station, had a 2 a.m. meeting with a high-ranking officer of SAVAK, the shah's brutal secret police, who had served the station loyally as an agent and informer. After passing the officer money and false documents to help him flee Tehran, Hart ran into a cordon of Khomeini's Revolutionary Guards. They beat him brutally, shouting "CIA! CIA!" Flat on his back, Hart drew his pistol and killed them both with two shots. Many years later, he remembered the glittering zeal he saw in their eyes. It was the face of holy war. "We haven't a clue as a nation," he reflected, "as to what the hell this is."
"IT WAS BEYOND INSULT"
Iranians from all walks of life, well-educated elites and wild-eyed radicals alike, thought the CIA was an omnipotent force with immense power over their lives. They could not have believed the truth: in the summer of 1979, the CIA station was a four-man operation, and all four were newly arrived in Iran. Howard Hart had returned to headquarters in July, leaving behind a new station chief, Tom Ahern, who had spent the past thirteen years in Japan; an experienced case officer, Malcolm Kalp; a communications technician, Phil Ward; and a thirty-two-year-old marine veteran, William J. Daugherty, who had joined the CIA nine months before. Daugherty had flown seventy-six combat missions during the Vietnam War. Tehran was his first CIA tour.
"I knew little about Iran," he recalled. "I knew even less about Iranians. My entire exposure to Iran, beyond the evening television news and a three-week area studies course at the State Department, consisted of what I had picked up during five weeks on the desk reading operational files."
Five months before, a rabble of Iranian Marxists had overrun the American embassy. The ayatollah's followers led a counterattack, threw the communists out, and set the Americans free. No one thought it could happen again. "Don't worry about another embassy attack," the CIA's Iran branch chief at headquarters had assured the Tehran station. "The only thing that could trigger an attack would be if the Shah was let into the United States--and no one in this town is stupid enough to do that."
On October 21, 1979, Daugherty stared at a new cable from headquarters. "I could not believe what I was reading," he recalled.
Under intense political pressure from friends of the shah--notably, Henry Kissinger--President Carter, against his better judgment, had decided that day to admit the exiled monarch to the United States for medical treatment. The president had agonized about this decision, fearing that Americans would be taken hostage in reprisal. "I shouted, 'Blank the Shah! He's just as well off playing tennis in Acapulco as he is in California,'" Carter recalled. "'What are we going to do if they take twenty of our Marines and kill one of them every morning at sunrise? Are we going to go to war with Iran?'"
No one at the White House thought to ask the agency for its opinion.
Two weeks later, a group of Iranian students, all followers of the ayatollah, seized the American embassy. They held fifty-three hostages for the rest of the Carter administration, 444 days and nights. Daugherty spent the last weeks of 1979 in solitary confinement. He recalled six interrogations between November 29 and December 14, starting at nightfall and going on until dawn, led by Hossein Sheik-ol-eslam, a future deputy foreign minister of Iran. After midnight on December 2, Hossein handed him a cable. "I thought my life was over," he wrote in a memoir for the CIA's in-house journal. "The cable gave my true name and stated clearly that I was to be assigned to the station in Teheran. It also mentioned the special program under which I had come into the Agency 10 months previously. When I looked up at Hossein and his stooges, they were grinning like a trio of Cheshire cats."
His interrogators "said they knew that I was the head of the CIA's entire Middle East spy network, that I had been planning Khomeini's assassination, and that I had been stirring up the Kurds to revolt against the Teheran government. They accused me of trying to destroy their country," Daugherty remembered. "These Iranians found it inconceivable that the CIA would ever send to such a critical place as Iran someone who was so ignorant of the local culture and language. It was so inconceivable to them that weeks later, when they at last came to realize the truth, they were personally offended. It had been difficult enough for them to accept that the CIA would post an inexperienced officer in their country. But it was beyond insult for that officer not to speak the language or know the customs, culture, and history of their country."
After each night's interrogation ended, Daugherty slept fitfully on a foam-rubber pad in the station chief's office. As hundreds of thousands of Iranians chanted in the streets outside the walled American compound, he dreamed of flying a warplane over the wide boulevards and incinerating the crowds with napalm.
The CIA could do nothing to free him and his fellow hostages at the American embassy. But in January 1980, the agency executed a classic espionage operation to extract six State Department employees who had managed to find refuge across town at the Canadian embassy.
The operation was the brainchild of the CIA's Tony Mendez, whose specialties were forgery and disguise. Mendez and his crew were the people who perfected the Mission Impossible masks that allowed white officers to disguise themselves as Africans, Arabs, and Asians. He was a rare exemplar of intuitive genius at the CIA.
As a cover for the mission in Iran, Mendez created Studio Six, a bogus Hollywood film production company; rented office space in Los Angeles; and took out full-page ads in Variety and The Hollywood Reporter announcing the upcoming filming of Argo, a science-fiction fantasy with location shots in Iran. The script for the movie--and for the operation--included documents and masks for the six Americans. Armed with a portfolio of forged passports and phony publicity, he cleared his entry to Iran with the proper authorities, flew in on a commercial flight from Bonn, checked into the Tehran Sheraton, obtained Swissair reservations to Zurich for the coming Monday, and took a taxi to the Canadian embassy to meet his six fellow Americans. Mendez brought theArgooperation off with barely a hitch. One of the Americans he freed punched him in the arm as they boarded the Swissair flight and said, "You arranged for everything, didn't you?" He was pointing at the name painted on the nose of the airplane--"Argau," a canton in Switzerland.
"We took it as a sign that everything would be all right," Mendez remembered. "We waited until the plane took off and had cleared Iranian airspace before we could give the thumbs up and order Bloody Marys."
"AN ACT OF VENGEANCE"
No such magic freed the remaining prisoners. The Pentagon's special-operations forces were in charge of Desert One, the April 1980 mission to save the hostages at the American embassy. "The effort relied very heavily on the CIA," said Anthony Quainton, the government's chief counterterrorism coordinator from 1978 to 1981. The agency provided intelligence on the probable location of the hostages inside the embassy compound. Its pilots flew a small plane undetected into the Iran desert to test the landing site for the mission. Howard Hart helped create the immensely complicated plan to extract the hostages and fly them to freedom. But the mission ended in catastrophe; eight commandos died in the Iranian wasteland after crashing a helicopter into a transport plane.
Life became much worse for the hostages. Bill Daugherty was taken from the embassy and thrown into prison. He spent most of the next nine months in solitary, in a cell barely big enough to hold his six-foot-three-frame. He ended up weighing 133 pounds. He and the rest of the hostages finally were freed by the consent of their captors at the hour that President Carter left the White House for the last time. Their release had nothing to do with covert action or American intelligence. It was a political statement devised to humiliate the United States.
The next day, Jimmy Carter, private citizen, came to meet the freed Americans at a military base in Germany. "I still have the photo stashed away somewhere," Daugherty recorded. "The former President looks awkward, and I look like an unsmiling cadaver."
The taking of the hostages was an "act of vengeance" for the CIA's 1953 coup in Iran, wrote Ken Pollack, a veteran CIA analyst of the Middle East. But the legacy of that long-ago operation went far beyond the Americans' ordeal. The zeal of the Iranian revolution would haunt the next four presidents of the United States and kill hundreds of Americans in the Middle East. A blaze of glory for the covert operators of the CIA's greatest generation became a tragic conflagration for their heirs.